Varieties of Limited Access Orders: The nexus between politics and economics in hybrid regimes

This article advances our understanding of differences in hybrid stability by going beyond existing regime typologies that separate the study of political institutions from the study of economic institutions. It combines the work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW) on varieties of social orders with the literature on political and economic regime typologies and dynamics to understand hybrid regimes as Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that differ in the way dominant elites limit access to political and economic resources. Based on a measurement of political and economic access applied to seven post‐Soviet states, the article identifies four types of LAOs. Challenging NWW's claim, it shows that hybrid regimes can combine different degrees of political and economic access to sustain stability. Our typology allows to form theoretical expectations about the kinds of political and/or economic changes that will move different types of LAOs toward more openness or closure

Perceptions of knowledge sharing among small family firm leaders: a structural equation model

Small family firms have many unique relational qualities with implications for how knowledge is passed between individuals. Extant literature posits leadership approach as important in explaining differences in knowledge-sharing climate from one firm to another. This study investigates how leadership approaches interact with family influence to inform perceptions of knowledge sharing. We utilize survey data (n = 110) from owner-managers of knowledge-intensive small family firms in Scotland. Our findings present a choice in leadership intention, contrasting organization-focused participation against family-influenced guidance. Insight is offered on the implications of this leadership choice at both organizational and familial level

The time to extinction for an SIS-household-epidemic model

We analyse a stochastic SIS epidemic amongst a finite population partitioned into households. Since the population is finite, the epidemic will eventually go extinct, i.e., have no more infectives in the population. We study the effects of population size and within household transmission upon the time to extinction. This is done through two approximations. The first approximation is suitable for all levels of within household transmission and is based upon an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process approximation for the diseases fluctuations about an endemic level relying on a large population. The second approximation is suitable for high levels of within household transmission and approximates the number of infectious households by a simple homogeneously mixing SIS model with the households replaced by individuals. The analysis, supported by a simulation study, shows that the mean time to extinction is minimized by moderate levels of within household transmission

Measuring social networks in British primary schools through scientific engagement

Primary schools constitute a key risk group for the transmission of infectious diseases, concentrating great numbers of immunologically naive individuals at high densities. Despite this, very little is known about the social patterns of mixing within a school, which are likely to contribute to disease transmission. In this study, we present a novel approach where scientific engagement was used as a tool to access school populations and measure social networks between young (4–11 years) children. By embedding our research project within enrichment activities to older secondary school (13–15) children, we could exploit the existing links between schools to achieve a high response rate for our study population (around 90% in most schools). Social contacts of primary school children were measured through self-reporting based on a questionnaire design, and analysed using the techniques of social network analysis. We find evidence of marked social structure and gender assortativity within and between classrooms in the same school. These patterns have been previously reported in smaller studies, but to our knowledge no study has attempted to exhaustively sample entire school populations. Our innovative approach facilitates access to a vitally important (but difficult to sample) epidemiological sub-group. It provides a model whereby scientific communication can be used to enhance, rather than merely complement, the outcomes of research

Public Participation Organizations and Open Policy:A Constitutional Moment for British Democracy?

This article builds on work in Science and Technology Studies and cognate disciplines concerning the institutionalization of public engagement and participation practices. It describes and analyses ethnographic qualitative research into one “organization of participation,” the UK government–funded Sciencewise program. Sciencewise’s interactions with broader political developments are explored, including the emergence of “open policy” as a key policy object in the UK context. The article considers what the new imaginary of openness means for institutionalized forms of public participation in science policymaking, asking whether this is illustrative of a “constitutional moment” in relations between society and science policymaking

Oscillating epidemics in a dynamic network model: stochastic and mean-field analysis

An adaptive network model using SIS epidemic propagation with link-type-dependent link activation and deletion is considered. Bifurcation analysis of the pairwise ODE approximation and the network-based stochastic simulation is carried out, showing that three typical behaviours may occur; namely, oscillations can be observed besides disease-free or endemic steady states. The oscillatory behaviour in the stochastic simulations is studied using Fourier analysis, as well as through analysing the exact master equations of the stochastic model. By going beyond simply comparing simulation results to mean-field models, our approach yields deeper insights into the observed phenomena and help better understand and map out the limitations of mean-field models

Speech Communication

Contains research objectives and reports on three research projects.U.S. Air Force (Air Force Cambridge Research Center, Air Research and Development Command) under Contract AF19(604)-6102National Science Foundatio

Employee Stock Ownership and Financial Performance in European Countries: The Moderating Effects of Uncertainty Avoidance and Social Trust

This study investigates how the effect of employee stock ownership on financial performance may hinge on the diverse cultural and societal contexts of European countries. Based on agency and national culture theories, we hypothesize that the positive relationship between employee stock ownership and return on assets (ROA) is stronger in those nations with lower uncertainty avoidance and higher social trust. Using a multisource, time‐lagged, large‐scale dataset of 1,741 firms from 21 countries in Europe, our multilevel, random coefficient modeling analysis found evidence for these hypotheses, suggesting that uncertainty avoidance and social trust serve as important contextual cues in predicting the linkage between employee stock ownership and financial performance. Our supplemental analysis with distinction between the managerial and nonmanagerial employee stock ownership further indicates managerial employee stock ownership has a direct positive effect on ROA. Although nonmanagerial employee stock ownership had a nonsignificant association with ROA, the relationship was positive and significant when uncertainty avoidance was low and social trust was high. This research contributes to the existing literature by illuminating some of the contextual influences altering the effectiveness of employee stock ownership. Our findings also offer practical suggestions for effectively using employee stock ownership

Moment Closure - A Brief Review

Moment closure methods appear in myriad scientific disciplines in the modelling of complex systems. The goal is to achieve a closed form of a large, usually even infinite, set of coupled differential (or difference) equations. Each equation describes the evolution of one "moment", a suitable coarse-grained quantity computable from the full state space. If the system is too large for analytical and/or numerical methods, then one aims to reduce it by finding a moment closure relation expressing "higher-order moments" in terms of "lower-order moments". In this brief review, we focus on highlighting how moment closure methods occur in different contexts. We also conjecture via a geometric explanation why it has been difficult to rigorously justify many moment closure approximations although they work very well in practice.Comment: short survey paper (max 20 pages) for a broad audience in mathematics, physics, chemistry and quantitative biolog